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September 30th, 2009
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Sept. 25, 2009 CITRIS
On September 25, 2009 in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) held a “Workshop on the Energy and Environment”. Faculty from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz met with industry leaders like HP and IBM. Among those at the event were Gary Baldwin, Sheri Brodeur, Karl Brown, Katherine Hartsell, Stig Hoegberg, Ron Hofmann, Marianna Lubansky, Rick McGeer, Dan O’Leary, Alex Portilla, Erix Saxe, James Simon, P. Subra, Steve Welch and Paul Wright. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 29th, 2009
Sept. 25, 2009 SVC Wireless
On September 25, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Silicon Valley China Wireless (SVC Wireless) provided opportunities for smart grid or green energy entrepreneurs to find funding and partners like IBM Venture and Cisco Alliance.Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 28th, 2009
Sept. 24, 2009 STC Andrew Davis LinkUp
On September 24, 2009 in Mountain View at the Dojo House, STC Silicon Valley hosted Andrew Davis of LinkUp to talk about what’s next in technical communication. Whatever you are doing now, it is time to do something else. You have to create profits for your clients or you won’t have any. Don’t be middle management. Be so good, so unique you cannot be offshored. Become the subject matter expert that clients want to talk to. Text from DJCline.com
Davis recommended business strategies that I’ve seen work elsewhere:
1. Identify an underserved audience in a prosperous industry with good long-term prospects (e.g., not snow sports or clean coal, but maybe healthcare, medical devices, or clean tech)
2. Acquire deep subject-matter expertise
3. Develop a respected, and responsive, professional network
4. Cultivate a role as trusted intermediary between seller and buyer
5. Provide a proprietary standalone product or service – such as training, support, recruiting, advertising, marketing, mediation, testing, or even documentation – with which you deliver unique profit-making potential to your customer. Try to make your solution synergistic, and don’t stop refining it.
6. Connect with both buyers and sellers, and dig deep for ways to make them both more financially successful.
7. Market your results in ways that resonate with ‘money people.’ Address the CFO’s concerns.
After the formal meeting Andrew also spoke to me about LinkUp which is not LinkedIn. LinkUp helps companies list jobs that are not normally advertised. Companies can post a position and find qualified candidates. He explained to me why LinkUp made sense for companies looking to actually hire people. In a nutshell, here is what sets LinkUp apart (from the employer’s perspective): Text from DJCline.com
1. Indexes jobs only from employers’ websites, and freshens them daily — its listings are always current, never fake, and usually unadvertised anywhere else. Result: candidates can confidently spend more time focused on your opportunities.
2. Carries no listings from recruiters, job boards, or aggregators. No middleman or advertising fees means candidates cost you less.
3. Publicizes all your jobs for less than the price of 2 postings on the major ‘pay-to-post’ job boards.
4. Offers a custom career portal, if you lack your own applicant-tracking system (ATS).
5. Brings candidates directly to your site, making them ATS-trackable and easier to inform.
6. Syndicates your job listings to Facebook and Twitter, solving your social-network distribution challenges.
7. Offers sponsored ads for $0.25/click — 1/8th the cost of Indeed, Simply Hired, and Google. Plus, you’re not bidding against the job boards as you would be on the aggregators.
8. Makes jobs ultra-accessible via the LinkUp iPhone app, blog widget, custom RSS feeds, email agents, Twitter, and Facebook app.
9. Carries almost 400,000 jobs from over 22,000 employers nationally, including all the Fortune 500 — at least 3 times more listings than The Ladders and Employment Crossing, and 8 times more than DICE.
10. August 2009 stats: 151,223 visits / 113,608 unique / average time on site 4:22 minutes. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All right reserved.
September 27th, 2009
Sept. 27, 2009 Blumbers
Beach Building
At Pebble Beach they actually have a sign telling people not to take pebbles.
I saw some excellent examples of little pebbles wearing away big rocks to create sandy beaches. It is a pretty straightforward geophysical process. A pebble is repeatedly washed onto a large rock and grinds a small depression releasing grains of sand. Lots of pebbles create lots of holes and eventually they create larger channels. Ultimately they wear away the big rock into pebbles that will wear away another big rock. All that sand compresses under the weight forming big rocks and the process starts over. The result is some interesting patterns worthy of a photograph. Text from DJCline.com
I’m sure this can be used as metaphor for something but it works just fine as geology.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
Posted by dj as Blumbers, Commentary at 9:51 AM PDT []
September 26th, 2009
Georgia O’Keeffe
Artists suffer for their art and the Lifetime Channel thought it was our turn by showing a biopic of Georgia O’Keeffe. The privates lives of painters are not pretty pictures and Joan Allen as O’Keeffe and her relationship with Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz is agonizing to watch. The irony is that without Stieglitz you would not have heard of O’Keeffe and without her you would never heard of him. Text from DJ Cline.com
I knew too much about the subject matter not to watch but I cannot recommend it. They do a good job on the lighting and sets. They display much of her art and the New Mexico countryside. The rest of the cast do their jobs. Ed Begley Jr. underplays Dr. Lee Stieglitz, the level-headed brother in law, Kathleen Chalfant overplays Hedwig Stieglitz. The O’Keeffe friends are as much fun as you thought they were. Linda Emond plays Beck Strand as the solid supporter, and Tyne Daly goes over the top as Mabel Dodge Stern. Anybody that has visited Mabel’s house in Taos knows she could really throw a party. Text from DJ Cline.com
Years ago I visited the museum in Santa Fe. They wanted me to leave my very expensive camera on a shelf before I could go in. I explained that while the artwork was priceless, my camera was still valuable to me as her brushes were to her. Promising not to take pictures, I put the camera back in my backpack and proceeded through the darkest tour this side of a coalmine. The irony of an artist who spent most her life in the desert sun having her work preserved and exhibited in virtual eclipse was not lost on me. Text from DJ Cline.com
If you want to know about Georgia O’Keeffe, see her pictures.
September 25th, 2009
Sept. 24, 2009 SDF Social Media
On September 24, 2009 in Cupertino at Apple the SDForum Tech Womens Program & Marketing SIG presented “Professional Development 2.0: Taming Social Media”. Jo Miller of Women’s Leadership Coaching moderated panelists Janet Fouts Partner of Tatu Digital Media, Sheena Gogna of LinkedIn and Ravit Lichtenberg of Ustrategy. The panel discussed how to use social media to develop your personal brand, expand your professional network, manage your career and improve productivity.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 24th, 2009
Sept. 23, 2009 SDF iPhone Apps Neal Goldstein
On September 23, 2009 in Palo Alto SDForum’s Software Architecture & Modeling SIG hosted Neal Goldstein to talk about “Context-Driven Design: Next-Generation Mobile Architectures: The iPhone And iPhone Applications”. Text from DJCline.com
Goldstein is author of “iPhone Application Development For Dummies” and a pioneer in the practical application of edge and cloud computing. He believes we are living in a post desktop world. A compelling iPhone application is fundamentally different from one on a personal computer. Compared to a PC, the iPhone is limited by its screen, memory, processor, battery and no keyboard or mouse. Despite this, the iPhone offers usability and mobile Internet access to applications with an embedded experience relevant to wherever the user is located. A good app is about user experience not user interface. Goldstein described the iPhone software architecture and how context-driven design rather than function design can make a substantial difference in user experience. Text from DJCline.com
Goldstein also talked about App approval process. He thinks it is opening up. They are concerned about offensive content and intellectual property. It is better to be the IP owner. They don’t want the app to crash when they test it. Apps prices more moving away from 99 cents and more to ten dollars as they add more value. People are also preferring to do data manipulation on the iPhone rather than over the network. Text from DJCline.com
The closest competitor to the iPhone might be the Android because it is projected to have more devices out there in two years. The problem is that the Android may be a fragmented market given the nature of cell phone carriers. The Blackberry is very difficult to develop for and the Palm Pre seems to have dropped off. Text from DJCline.com
In the future he sees more power and speed for the iPhone, comparing its current state to the early days of the Mac, which was underpowered but still did amazing things. It is worth getting in early and developing for. He also sees opportunities for faster and more reliable networks. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 23rd, 2009
Sept. 23, 2009 Engage Expo
On September 23, 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center’s Engage Expo held a panel discussion on”How Venture Capital Sees Social Media” SDForum’s Susan Lucas-Conwell moderated panelists Timothy Chang of Norwest Venture Partners, Stewart Guenther of Venture Capital-Private Equity Roundtable, Shai Goldman of SVB Capital and Michael Kim of Rustic Canyon Partners. Text from DJCline.com
So what are the rules of engagement for social media? One-way boxed media like books and CDs are dead. Social media is about community, conversations and content. Theoretically social media is a platform-independent web service targeting customers who want to spend as much time as possible in your space. Revenue streams are shifting from advertising to subscriptions. The buzzwords are Media-As-Service (MAS), Free-To-Play (FTP) and metagames. If you are developing for the Apple iPhone you have good chance at funding because of the market and the distribution channel. Text from DJCline.com
If you want start a company think about how you are going to end it. Are you going to build it to be bought? What is your business plan and revenue stream? Do you know many venture capitalists want fifteen times their 2.5 million dollar investment back? Can you bootstrap it with angel investors? Talk to your potential acquiring company about who would be interested in investing. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 22nd, 2009
Tarantula Spider
Last week I was walking from one building to another in Palo Alto and saw this large spider moving slowly on the sidewalk. It has been rather hot but I thought it was unusual. It looks like a brown tarantula but it seems a little too far north for it to be that. If there are any arachnid experts out there, I would love to know what kind it really is.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
Posted by dj as Commentary at 4:42 PM PDT []
September 21st, 2009
Sept. 18, 2009 SDF Innovation and Corporate Research Fair
On September 18, 2009 in Santa Clara at Techmart, SDForum held the Second Annual Open Innovation and Corporate Research Fair: “Innovating in a Down Economy”. Silicon Valley’s leading high-tech corporations, including EMC, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Nokia and PayPal shared their thoughts, insights and best practices on how not only to survive, but to identify market share and growth opportunities. Learn how industry leaders innovate and how to partner with them.
Keynote Speakers included Gene Alston of PayPal, Sheryl Chamberlain of EMC, Elizabeth “Betsy” Corcoran of Forbes.com, Rich Friedrich of Hewlett-Packard, Deborah Magid of IBM and John Shen of Nokia Research Center.
Mark F. Radcliffe of DLA Piper moderated panelists Don Clark of NEC, Gary Getz of Strategos, Suzanne Harrison of Gathering2.0, Ron S. Laurie of Inflexion Point Group and David Smith of Tynax. The topic was”Open Innovation in Practice”.
Priya Ganapati of Wired Digital gave the closing summary on the need for basic research.
In the afternoon there were technology exhibitions by the participating companies like Dojo House, Huawei, LongJump, Nokia, PayPal, rrripple, and Zeus.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 20th, 2009
Sept. 20, 2009 Blumbers
Non-Smoke Signals
I saw this sign and was reminded how much things have changed regarding smoking. Ten years ago the city of San Jose banned smoking within 25 feet of a building entrance. Companies and employees who allowed it were breaking the law and endangering people. Gone are the days when the Simpsons’s Patty and Selma could stand by the door and make other people sick with secondhand smoke. Text from DJCline.com
Smoking is the number one preventable cause of death in America today, with over 430,000 dying each year from tobacco-related causes. Another 53,000 non-smoking Americans die annually from inhaling other people’s tobacco smoke. Community activists have been working on bans around the country for years. Text from DJCline.com
The peninsula city of Belmont has an ordinance prohibiting smoking on sidewalks, in parks, even in apartments and condominiums – virtually everywhere except inside cars and single-family homes. If you live in an apartment or condo, if you work in Belmont, you are not allowed to smoke. Text from DJCline.com
The east bay city of Richmond is considering a similar ban. Richmond is a poor community riddled with gang violence and yet you are more likely to die from a fellow employee with a cigarette than a gun. Some non-smoking advocates argue cigarettes are assault weapons with better lobbyists. In a way, “door smokers” are both suicidal and homicidal in that they know they are harming themselves and others. Their cancerous bullets are slow but just as deadly. Text from DJCline.com
I’ve lost friends to smoking. Smokers chose to smoke. Secondhand survivors had no choice. Like many recovering addicts, it would be a start if smokers apologized for the harm they caused others. If you’ve quit and taken up some other obsessive compulsive behavior that’s fine, but you are not off the hook for the damage you have done to others. If you have a website, blog or twitter, take responsibility and apologize for the harm you caused. Make a public statement saying you created a dangerous workplace for others. Just a simple sentence. No rationalizing, philosophizing, equivocating or excuses. Text from DJCline.com
Otherwise your words and actions are just blowing smoke. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
Posted by dj as Blumbers, Commentary at 4:51 PM PDT []
September 19th, 2009
Sept. 17, 2009 Future Salon Collaboration
On September 17, 2009 in Palo Alto at SAP, Future Salon hosted Nilofer Merchant. She talked about her book “The New How Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy.”
Merchant knows the power of community, collaboration or co-creation. She uses every possible communication channel to reach out: blogs, wikis, point systems, face to face meetings. Ultimately all networking is social.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 18th, 2009
Sept. 17, 2009 SDF Investor Perspective
On September 17, 2009 in Palo Alto at SAP, SDForum’s Engineering Leadership SIG hosted Laura Roden, Founder and Managing Director of VC Privé, LLC who presented “Funding from the Investor Perspective: How VCs and Angels Work”. Roden talked about how investors see the economic and subjective drivers of the funding process. Put yourself in the investors shoes. If you had a million dollars who would you give it to? Frankly, the last few years have been tough for VCs and they want to know how you are going to make money. Text from DJCline.com
VC Privé is a placement agent representing venture capital funds raising money. VC Privé is a channel for private investors who want information and access to top-tier funds in the range from $100,000-$5mm per fund. They represent funds in life sciences, clean energy, internet and software, consumer, and international investment sectors. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 17th, 2009
Electric Tricycle Or Electrike(tm)
I’m always looking for electric vehicles. In Palo Alto I saw what I think is an adult tricycle that may partially run on batteries. It has a windshield and recumbent seating. I think it would offer more stability and visibility but still have a smaller carbon footprint. I could not find the owner so I don’t have anymore information about it. I’m tempted to name it the Electrike ™. Text from DJCline.com
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 16th, 2009
Sept. 15, 2009 CICC Tech Driven Recovery
On Tuesday, September 15, 2009 in Mountain View at Fenwick & West, the California Israel Chamber of Commerce hosted the CICC 2009 Tech M&A Forum “Will 2010 See a Tech Driven Recovery in M&A Activity?”
Andrew Dickinson of Lazard gave a detailed overview of the economic statistics of the past year. Despite everything that has happened there has been an uptick in high technology mergers and acquisitions. The low point may have been at the end of last year through March and the numbers have been slowly improving ever since.
Gil Livnah of Livnah Associates moderated panelists Clemens Buss of Lazard, Doug Cogen of Fenwick & West, Jeff Herbst of Nvidia, Hilton Romanski of Cisco and Trina Van Pelt of Intel Capital. They gave their particular take on the economy and how it may fair in 2010 for the U.S. and Israeli markets.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 15th, 2009
Sept. 24, 2009 STC Andrew Davis Preview
Please join us for our September meeting on Thursday, September 24, 2009 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at Hacker Dojo located at 140 South Whisman Road in Mountain View. Please note that this meeting is free of charge and that food will not be provided. Attendees can bring food to eat to the meeting.
The meeting topic is What’s Next? Glimpsing the opportunity beyond the impasse with Andrew Davis.
If you’re feeling insecure about your professional prospects, you’re in good company. The world has changed, your cheese has moved as in the book “Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life” by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard. It is high time to face facts: most high-tech technical communicators have become commodities, purveyors of expensive and increasingly unvalued services.
Globalization, a shrinking economy, impatient customers, and increasingly lean, “do-more-with-less” companies are now the norm. Especially in high tech, product quality deteriorates but users seem to care only about initial cost. Meanwhile, technical communicators have become passive and disengaged from their audience, their compensation rates are trending downward, job security has become a joke, and true professional advancement is rare. Job satisfaction is the exception rather than the rule.
My view is that high-tech technical communicators’ best option is to apply their skills to other industries and focus on helping customers generate profits. I have some specific answers to the ‘where from here’ question, but the list is far from complete and I hope to catalyze (with insights, anecdotes, hope and, yes, fear) a productive discussion about how to respond to the marketplace’s challenges.
Speaker: Andrew Davis runs Synergistech Communications, a recruiting firm that since 1995 has matched talented technical communicators with staff and contract opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Andrew is also a former Technical Writer of system administration and software developer documentation for companies such as Oracle (documenting relational databases on minicomputers), IBM (UNIX hypertext authoring tools), Informix (Windows database tools), Network Equipment Technologies (PBXs and routers), and Verity (enterprise text search tools). He’s well-connected in Silicon Valley’s software and telecommunications documentation communities. He also recruits technical trainers and instructional designers, medical writers, and user experience (UX) professionals.
Synergistech is currently doing on-demand recruiting, namely ’speaking when spoken to’ rather than marketing its services actively. Most of its efforts are focused on developing a web-based job-seeking product for SF Bay Area technology workers.
Advance reservations are requested, please email our Reservations Manager if you plan to attend.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 14th, 2009
Sept. 14, 2009 CIDM Vancouver
On September 14, 2009 in Vancouver, Washington, the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) held its 11th Annual Best Practices Conference for tech pub managers. The theme this year is from John P. Kotter’s book “A Sense of Urgency”. Kotter talked about the three prongs of his thesis: deathly complacency, a false sense of urgency, and a genuine sense of urgency. Kotter’s four tactics are to bring the outside in, behave with urgency every day, find opportunity in crises and deal with the NoNos. I still have no idea what that last one is all about. Text from DJCline.com
Conference speakers include Elizabeth Anders, Alex Blanton, Maria Brownstein, Terry Barraclough, Helen Cavender, Carl Chatfield, Christopher Gales, Bill Gearhart, Bobbi Gibson, JoAnne Hackos, Tom Parker, Palmer Pearson, Charlotte Robidoux, Kathryn Showers, Suzanne Sowinska, Ann Teasley, Beth Thomerson, Bill Tilley, Scott Wahl, Daphne Walmer, and Paul Zimmerman. As much as you learn in these conferences, you can learn quite a bit by just bumping into people and listening. Text from DJCline.com
I always confuse this town with the one in British Columbia. Some refer to that one as “Vancouver BC” which makes it sound like a bunch of cavemen live there. Here in “Vancouver AD” the hotel looks like it was attacked by Lincoln logs with lots of native themed rugs and the obligatory totem pole in the lobby. Outside, it is a good day, which means it is cloudy and not raining. Outsiders give this area a hard time but it can’t help being where it is. It sits next to two volcanoes, an ocean with rising sea levels, a high tsunami risk and is constantly pelted by polluted rain coming over from China. People should get a medal just for living here. Text from DJCline.com
Housing is cheap but that does not surprise me. The economy is down. I tried to cheer one group up and just couldn’t do it. Their boss spoke to me afterwards and said that most of them were on medication. It keeps the relocated employees from getting depressed but also keeps them from laughing. Some people who move here try to cope in all sorts of crazy ways but are really suffering inside. My heart would go out to them if I hadn’t left it in San Francisco (cue music). Text from DJCline.com
There are ravens outside the window making noises. I guess I’ll go and see what they have to say.
P.S. Can you figure out the joke in this posting?
P
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
September 13th, 2009
Sept. 13, 2009 Blumbers
Searching Candidates And Finding Lawsuits
Did you ever see your name mentioned in a search result and know that it was not you? What if the information was wrong? How would anyone else know? What about a potential employer?
Lester Rosen of Employment Screening Resources (ESR) appeared at the Northern California Human Resources Association (NCHRA) in San Francisco on Friday. He warned employers about the risks of using social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Twitter, YouTube and others. I will try to explain what he talks about, but I urge you to read his articles or hear him speak in person.
From one viewpoint, the process of hiring people is itself an act of discrimination. Companies must discriminate or decide who to hire but must do it legally. Most social networking by its very definition was not designed or intended for business. It is social and using it for commercial purposes may make you an intruder into someone’s privacy. By surfing you may determine a person’s race, creed, color, nationality, sex, religious affiliation, marital status or medical condition. A photo may indicate a disability, nationality or religion. A potential employer knowing any of this may have too much information on a candidate. Civil rights laws still apply and you may violate them just by finding such information. No employer wants to be a test case in cyberspace.
Even worse, the person you are looking at online may not even be the same person applying for the job. They could be an online computer twin or person with the same or similar name. The person might be cyber slammed anonymously in a discussion group or fake website. The information displayed is not a sworn affidavit or deposition. Rumor, slander, character assassination, defamation and just plain inaccurate information abound on the Internet. If someone can’t swear to it, own up to it, or say it to your face, consider the source and be prepared to discount it.. Never whisper something about someone you would not be prepared to say aloud in court.
One strategy is to obtain consent for a search from the candidate only if there is a conditional offer. Employers can look for statements made about their company, damaging behavior, business interests or needs. Until there is more legal precedent, follow existing best practices when hiring. Googling someone is not enough.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
Posted by dj as Blumbers, Commentary at 4:54 PM PDT []
September 12th, 2009
